POET

Category: essays

My essay, ‘Was T. S. Eliot a Buddhist?’ has been re-published in the wonderful Blue Hour Magazine. Please take a look, and while you’re there consider submitting something yourself – the editors, Susie and Moriah, are the loveliest around.

Several years ago I taught a Buddhist class on the profound subject of emptiness, and I used this quote to illustrate what I felt was our true goal in life – to consciously return home.

Not home in the sense of an external place, but as an internal place of perfect inner peace and connectedness – a state which Buddhists enticingly call the union of bliss and emptiness.

Bliss refers to our most subtle and clear-seeing level of mind, an intoxicating place existing deep down beneath the turbulence of our conceptions.

Emptiness is a little trickier. Essentially it is the theory of how things don’t exist – that is, they are empty of existing independently, either from all other phenomena, or from the minds that perceive them. Which is not the same as saying that things do not exist at all! Just that they do not exist in the way they appear to.

Of course this may sound rather strange – our world certainly appears to be a very solid and independent place, doesn’t it? It feels very much as if it’s existing ‘out there’, quite separate from our mind, which exists ‘in here’.

But as Buddha, and now quantum physicists have discovered, appearances are nearly always deceptive, and our reality is far from ‘real’. Like a dream, a mirage, a magician’s illusion… while things do exist, it is only just, and not in the solid way they appear to.

With our mind we make the world

Buddha said, and while this in itself is not a problem (in fact in the end it is the key to the solution) failing to understanding the world’s illusory nature is.

For when we fail to recognize the intimate connection between mind and its projections, we find ourselves searching through all the world’s places for the answer to our problems. Not understanding the true internal origination of our pleasure and pain, we expect more from life than it can realistically deliver, and are left constantly, heartbreakingly wanting…

Spiritual paths (of all descriptions) take us in the opposite direction. Buddhist means ‘inner being’ and its practises take you on an internal journey, returning you to your very source, your own true nature, emptiness.

As we meditate we delve deeper and deeper inside our own minds, exploring down through ever more subtle levels and challenging ourselves to redefine who we think we are.

We try to bring our conscious awareness to this process, even during times of sleep and death, for it is at these times of least external distraction that we have the greatest opportunity to access the most clear seeing level of mind – the clear light of bliss.

When this blissful state is manifest our mind is naturally unclouded by the stories it habitually creates about our world, ourselves and others. During these moments we have a powerful opportunity to understand our own true nature and to reunite with our true ‘home’. Tragically, for most, this opportunity is missed.

Like a tourist lulled into unconsciousness on a train, we sleep through what passes by outside the window of our perceptions, never fully aware, and therefore never fully able to experience it. Night after night, life after life, our internal explorations naturally take us ‘home’, but time and again we fail to recognize it clearly – for what it is, or for who we are.

Hoodwinked by the dream of our own projections, we grasp instead onto what is not (was never) really there, except in our own minds making…

Our search for happiness (or satisfaction, peace, home, enlightenment) in all its myriad expressions (as urgings for love, sex, drugs, shoes, money, success) is really all about this divine drive for union with our true selves.

As Eliot pointed out in the Four Quartets, this is our real job, our highest purpose – to return to that primordial union of bliss and emptiness (or God, he would call it) and to consciously know that state for the first time. To recognize ourselves as we really are – free of race, gender, job, social status, ego; what’s left after all these are gone is what there is.

But this is at least a lifetimes work, perhaps many lifetimes…

Was T. S. Eliot a Buddhist? Being a Christian, I’m sure he would not have said so. And yet, unsurprisingly, it seems our shared purpose is the same.